Trading Bots Started Selling Bitcoin 10% Below the Market Price on Kraken
You must have heard about hacking the crypto exchanges and stealing vast chunks of money from the trading platform or playing with the user’s account to misuse the data. But, this news is new and different from those hacking attempts, which are now almost regular and less surprising. Kraken, one US-based crypt exchange suffered from a bot interference.
Someone misconfigured the trading bots on the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange and started trading bitcoins at the cost 10% lower than the market price. This lead to a series of bad trades for everyone who was associated with Bitcoin. Bots being a machine or software might get out of sync and do something which is not programmed. This is not happening for the first time though ( in the crypto space). It had happened earlier too, when Ethereum (ETH) flash’s price came down from $310 to $0.10 for a few seconds. This was repeated on one of the biggest and known crypto exchange platforms a couple of years ago – Coinbase.
Such incidents happen due to a few faults in algorithms. This is precisely what happened on the best crypto exchange France called Kraken. Some days ago the trading price of BTC/GBP trading pair got affected. Bitcoins worth tens of thousands of dollars were traded at a rate lower than the market price by 10%, due to an algorithmic mishap.
The sudden cut in price creates chaos on the platform. The trading of ETH started at 85 GBP ($110), on the other hand, BTC started trading (for a few seconds) at 3500 GDP. This change was seen only on Kraken exchange platform which leads to even more confusion among Bitcoin traders.
One crypto lover posted on twitter ( with a user account named @2xjump). The user said that the evident algorithmic mishap which happened on the Kraken exchange due to misconfigured trading bots was mostly because of the closure of the Forex markets, which caused the algorithm to run on the false program and show wrong numbers.
If you are using bots or trading on a platform which entirely run by bots, make sure you set the proper stop-losses.
